'Longstreet' Review: A Complex Confederate General - WSJ - The Wall Street Journal

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James Longstreet, ca. 1864.Photo: GRANGER

Lt. Gen. James Longstreet remains the Confederacy’s most controversial senior military leader. Born in 1821, the West Point graduate, like many of his future comrades in arms, served ably during the war with Mexico and on the Western frontier before resigning his commission in 1861 to join the Confederacy. His rise to high rank was meteoric; during the second year of the Civil War he became Gen. Robert E. Lee’s second-in-command in the Army of Northern Virginia, outranking the fabled Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

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Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

By Elizabeth Varon

Simon & Schuster

480 pages

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Longstreet commanded troops from brigade to corps level in the major battles of the war’s eastern theater and in 1863 scored a decisive victory at Chickamauga, the largest and bloodiest battle in the west. He opposed Lee’s ill-fated frontal attack—the famous Pickett’s Charge—at Gettysburg, and for this and other perceived failings, Lost Cause apologists and Lee acolytes have long blamed him for the Confederate defeat there, which, they argue, cost the South the war.